Discoveries and Results - P.F.Henshaw as of
seem like fundamental discoveries for understanding nature
Website - Synapse9.com Blog -
A scientific method for using
information gaps to study the locally creative processes nature uses to change
|... Some deep natural gaps in our
information are unusually rich in useful detail. Studying gaps
in information is how a child learns language too, keeping an unusually open
mind, waiting for confirmations you can reliably build on, like fishing.
What you find fishing in these spots of "dark reality" is added "color and
dimension" for all the most ordinary things, along with a great utility in
seeing how "in the dark" depicting nature as our explanations leaves us.
- individual system learning processes in air currents
- organized thermal molecular motion with energy storage and release
- mathematics of system continuity in discontinuous information
- continual growth in any process violates the conservation laws of physics
- stages of natural system development implied by the conservation laws
- punctuated genetic evolution may occur by a dynamic learning process
- stabilizing economies requires ending wealth concentration by compounding
- some useful ways to learn how the learning systems around us work
- some useful ways to design for an environment of learning systems
- errors of ecology and economy in representing learning systems with
- danger of adding to internal conflict by letting outside pressure control
More detail 6/17/06 9/7/08
- 1978 Two kinds of organized molecular motion
- A spontaneous energy storage and release in a chemically neutral fluid.
I never mentioned it explicitly until now, because it's a little uncommon and
I've had no way to explain it, but it's the implicit subject of my enduringly
most popular web page.
- Air currents emerge as systems of organized molecular motion for energy
transfer, required to allow passive energy transfer by movement within a
- Systemization as revealing the presence of a gradient.
- A Self-organizing air current networks may be exploited to postpone the
onset of turbulence.
- 1979 Time as a process, not a variable location on a scale
- Equations of change use time as a variable on a scale that can't depict the
continual complex processes of change that are the actual engines of time. the
"Unhidden Pattern of Events" offers a story
board sequence of evolutionary processes to begin another approach for
exploring the individual event processes.
- Physical things and processes are invariably complete, detailed,
particular and definite in their individual occurrence, as far as anyone can
tell, and all uncertainty might well be just a feature of our information.
It appears that only our ability to predict and understand them is vague
and statistical. Considering them as individual and particular
rather than an instance of an average occurrence with error leads to very
different and productive questions.
- 1979 Emergent systems can be studied as complete continuities of
organizational development from
beginning to end, 'whole events'
- Growth trends usually locate the intensification of local networks of emergent
complex systems or their decay. The four signs of change, iidd.htm and later version 'chapters'
- Diminishing returns on investment is a primary indicator of limits of
systemization and approaching ends of development
- Compounding mechanisms for growth systems are increasingly unstable, and
always end their own operation by continually changing the network's scale to
collide with its internal or external environmental limits. Compounding
responds to limits by being changed by them.
- That relatively sudden organizational change is triggered either from inside
or outside of the system network and can lead to a range of outcomes from
stabilization to sudden disordering.
- 1979 Diminishing returns as direction of progress is a
primary sign of terminal limits
- Economic growth will be self-destabilizing because stability requires
monetary growth based on producing expanding opportunities from diminishing
- Emergent economies that survive end their growth and compounding mechanism
by diverting their surpluses to completing and running the system without
compounding returns. That switch may be in response to either an
internal or external signal or constraint, usually of some diminishing return.
- 1982 Deduction that whole system models that allow growth require
an end of compounding returns to stabilize without disrupting systems that
- 1985 SGSR papers on directed opportunity
and limits of feedback
- 1993 Continuity & Divergence Principle, that beginnings require
local divergent processes consistent with the conservation laws in having
limited rates of change involving processes on multiple scales.
- 1999 Divergent developmental processes in
- 1999 Features of Derivative Continuity in Natural Process
IJPRAI paper: derivative reconstruction &
step variance statistical test to rule out random walk in time sequence data.
- 2007 Roughness suppression test for underlying continuity in
- 2008 General theory of individualism
Conservation of change in complex systems
and organizational development processes as guides to
learning about complex systems, "little bangs" and a theorem of
continuity and divergence, solidified with
perspective of complex systems as learning processes with emergent network
cells of relationships that actively explore their environments, applications
& methods. (implicit in 1978 "Unhidden Pattern of Events"
and other early work. A synthesis of 30 years in the course of two
critical reinvention of sustainability theory, writing several sets of teaching
tools, absorbing very numerous books, a dozen conferences on related emerging
disciplines, unusually voluminous and diverse conversations by mail and email
and piles of notes, then dropping out because not
explaining it right isn't the problem...)
- 2008 Stability in ecosystems is caused by the resourceful learning
of individuals Cosmos paper.
- 2008 The specific reductionisms of science preventing its
study of life.
The functional disinformation of self-consistent models for
representing environments with inconsistent and independently learning parts
individually responding to each other and their environments. The divergent physical processes that are connected by
environments without predetermination. Confirming the objection of Robert Rosen
that excluding divergent series from the tools of science prevents
mathematical science from exploring life with the theorem of
continuity and divergence .
- 2009 Traced an error to H T Odum in representing businesses as
systems without people to error of ecology in reducing systems to their
abstract measures, and misrepresenting the impacts of businesses and economic
growth, and the whole range of issues for systems with independently learning
parts on which our lives depend.
- 2009 The role of considering perception (consciousness) to be
reality, causing people to primarily arrive at their information from other
information, of unknown origin, permitting perceived reality to wander,
settled only by mutual agreement, seeming to be be the source of the
extensive but highly erratic human predilection for magical thinking as well
as the mysterious absence of connections between schools of thought, even
for scientists considering the same subject matter.
- 2010 A standard method for calibrating physical measures of
complex distributed systems with indentifying their functional boundaries
and exhaustive search within those boundaries.
Some other fairly solid results in various specialties: (old
- Gamma Ray bursts have intricate
are apparently the result of cosmic
most likely from black hole formation.
--note that this conclusion was reached by shape analysis long before
astrophysicists reached the same conclusion by other methods.
- If there ever was an economic growth
it preceded 1880. The appearance of a growth constant since then has
been just an artifact of the statistical method used, since, with only
one exception, the rate of economic growth has been in continual
throughout the history of the statistical record. The statistical
of a sustained growth rate comes from a combination of short term
and the presence of one significant rise.
- Biological evolution sometimes
occurs by a growth process rather
than just following a random drift or varying environmental
This shows that the gaps in the record of evolution could be explained by the
kind of complex system development process which accounts for system
- Changes in earth surface temperature and
rates of economic
CO2) over the past 100 years exhibit differing
that suggest that other factors have been dominant in climate
Over the past 30 years their accelerations of change appear linked in appearing to have several matching turning
points, though the directions of each trend is still quite different.
-- this is dated but worth considering in refining the understanding of the